Was he actually thinking that those $450 were just gifted by the exporter?
How does this benefit me?
…and how would it have benefited you, if the seller had to pay it? They would either increase the price for you or never have made the deal.
Even the thing you expected would have been stupid for you 🤣
They probaly thought the seller would pay without raising the price. A lot of these folks don’t know how tariffs work in the first place and when the orange one said it would punish other countries for being unfair to the US they assumed the seller would recognize the error of their ways and foot the bill while keeping the price the same to stay competitive.
Folks that make complaints like this on social media don’t seem prone to thinking the consequences of an action through…
Even the thing you expected would have been stupid for you 🤣
But this is the key piece of information MAGA fails to realize: if you make things more expensive for the manufacturer, the price goes up so they can remain profitable.
MAGAs love the idea of Trump using tariffs to “punish” the countries they don’t like until they find out that those countries don’t actually pay the tariffs. The consumer does.
Absolutely, but what I find particularly frustrating is their lack of understanding about how businesses always pass on operating costs. They must factor all these expenses into the price of goods, so even if they somehow managed to make foreign manufacturers pay the tariffs, the price of said products would still reflect their production costs.
The argument by even supposedly slightly saner folks like Besset was all companies would absorb the cost and therefore win win and to be fair many of them have.
We’ve seen companies like Home Depot publicly declare it won’t pass along tariff-related increases to consumers.
In this case the OP is just an idiot
But they were supposed to pay it to show him kindness.
Okay so pretend they are right, pretend that the Spanish manufacturer pays the tariff:
Do you think they will still sell it at the same price if they had to pay $450? They’d just charge you more to cover their fees, lmfao.
Edit: Oh someone here already commented this, oops
Maybe they assumed it was built into the price already.
So, one of the few countries in the western world (don’t know enough to generalize more) that never includes the taxes in the prices, but somehow they expected the tariffs to be included in the price…
PS: This is not a dig at you, it is because surely you are right about their expectation in many cases…
Everything is confusing, so I don’t really blame people.
Some platforms you pay tariffs inclusive of price (rare, but I have seen it), most you pay at checkout like a tax line item, others you get a bill from the shipper. And sometimes you think your ordering something from China but it’s actually shipped from a domestic warehouse so the tariffs were already paid.
If this is their business, I imagine they are aware of the pricing of this stuff, and would know what it costs prior to tariffs
The inability to critically think is the first and foremost requirement to be an American conservative.
The inability to critically think is the first and foremost requirement to be a
nAmericanconservative.Ftfy
I think you added an extra word on the end there…
The problem with people like this is NOT the fact that they were dumb enough to believe Trump’s lies about tariffs.
The real problem is them crying more about having to pay the tariffs themselves than about having been blatantly lied to.
They’ll find some way to blame Kamala for it, don’t worry
how could you not impose tariffs if Kamala did run, i mean it is logic
The propaganda on tariffs is that foreign imports are bad and domestic manufacturing is good. And plenty of the conservative community accepts this, because they aren’t trying to buy direct from overseas. This guy is an outlier - a MAGA dude who is attempting to import a $2000 widget from Spain for whatever reason - and not representative of the average American voter.
Trump’s statements on tariffs aren’t even strictly false. Businesses can and do shave their margins, eating some percentage of the cost of tariffs, in order to keep their bulk exports competitive. You’re just not going to see that happen on a one-off specialty import, because the guy in Spain isn’t trying to be competitive at scale with a rival US industry.
We’re already seeing more high value manufacturing happening within the US to evade Trump’s tariffs. US tariffs on Japanese imports during the 1987 trade war brought electronics and auto manufacturing into the country in the same way. That’s why we’ve been building Toyota Cars in Kentucky for decades.
Now we’re seeing Samsung and LG planning plants in the US. We’re seeing the same from BMW and Volkswagon. Is this smart trade policy? Feel free to inject your own economic orthodoxy below. But to say its not working as intended… No. The US has enormous influence in global trade. What Trump’s doing has absolutely reversed the flow of manufacturer outsourcing.
The propaganda on tariffs is that foreign imports are bad and domestic manufacturing is good.
Right, but you put the tariffs in place after you have the domestic manufacturing capabilities, not before.
When you can attract large foreign investments, the order matters less. You’ll experience more pain by imposing tariffs first and building out infrastructure second. But we’re governed by a party that seems to relish in the pain of their constituents. So this might be more of a feature than a bug.
It’s interesting that you openly call it propaganda, and then go on to parrot it over and over.
Businesses can and do shave their margins, eating some percentage of the cost of tariffs, in order to keep their bulk exports competitive. You’re just not going to see that happen on a one-off specialty import,
Eh no. The simplification that the customer pays is for practical purposes basically correct. There is little will to shave margins when industries and nations are broadly effected, insufficient margins to absorb much, and little reason even bother to do so save to preserve future business with the expectation that tariffs will be dropped.
What you are seeing sometimes is markets operating on coyote time. Goods are already purchases/imported. Goods are purchased on contracts that don’t account for tariffs screwing the importer. Tariffs are applied then yanked before prices have to adjust. When they haven’t there is suspicion that they will soon be based on prior TACO behavior and future expectation is that much profit at prior margins will be lost if not carefully managed.
Long term you will absolutely see prices rise to cover 100% of the .
What Trump’s doing has absolutely reversed the flow of manufacturer outsourcing.
How much actual work vs future commitments again?
There is little will to shave margins when industries and nations are broadly effected, insufficient margins to absorb much, and little reason even bother to do so save to preserve future business with the expectation that tariffs will be dropped.
There’s plenty of will when a commodity is fungible and margins are high. We can see this in retail prices relative to tariff rates.
Our observed average price increases — at 5.4% for imported goods and 3% for domestic goods — are moderate relative to the size of announced tariff rates, particularly on Chinese products. We find that roughly 14 to 20 percent of the tariff changes were reflected in retail prices within six months. These rates are higher and materialize faster than those observed during the 2018–2019 U.S.–China trade war, but remain well below full pass-through, reflecting gradual transmission and continuing uncertainty about policy persistence.
When profit margins on a product are high, the retailer is more comfortable absorbing the tariff rate through lower marginal profit. Its on products with lower margins that we’re seeing the highest inflation rates.
What’s more, as imports rise in price they raise the clearing rate for all products, which encourages domestically produced products to rise in price to match. So you’re “paying the tariff” on goods that aren’t even being tariffed, because they’re chasing rising prices of low margin imports.
How much actual work vs future commitments again?
More actual work with each month these tariffs linger. There’s other factors, of course. The declining value of the dollar is inducing demand for US capital and real estate from overseas, as well as cheapening the cost of US labor. And with three more years of Trump in office (plus the real possibility that we get more MAGA Republicans in years to come) business leadership is inclined to believe a high-tariff / low-tax economy is the future for America.
This makes the US an ideal tax haven. We’ve been a popular safe-harbor for Chinese, Japanese, English, German, and French billionaires to shield their own wealth from their home countries. And if the EU commits to a uniform income or wealth tax policy, this trend will only continue.
His tariffs have short shelf lives, exceptions, and are constantly rolled back. An index of many goods many of which are not tariffed or haven’t been tariffed long enough for domestic supplies to have run out conflated with all other price fluctuations is going to make it hard to tease out individual factors.
You could pick a given item that was continually tariffed for a year and discover unit by unit what actual effect of tariffs was. You would presumably find that broad tariffs on everything as a source of revenue is ultimately 99./9% a tax on the population because whilst merchants are absolutely willing to stockpile domestically to ride out expected temporary hikes and manufacturers may find it important to protect future business. Losing a lot of your margin may be worthy to keep the business you when you expect it to be rolled back 90 days later it is not acceptable as the permanent state of affairs.
This is especially true as rates are high.
This is a boring and tedious way to do it but being unwilling to do it means you probably don’t care about getting the correct answer.
His tariffs have short shelf lives, exceptions, and are constantly rolled back.
He loves to threaten triple digit tariffs, then ratchet them back down to double digits. The average rate on international imports right now is around 14%, compared to 1.5% under Biden. Trump is very seriously and deliberately attempting to pivot the US from an income tax based government revenue model to an import tax model that we haven’t seen since Coolidge (a paleocon celebrity since the Reagan years).
You could pick a given item that was continually tariffed for a year and discover unit by unit what actual effect of tariffs was. You would presumably find that broad tariffs on everything as a source of revenue is ultimately 99./9% a tax on the population
Real price increases haven’t kept up with the increased tariff rates. If you ever make it through B-school or drop into a few college economics classes, you’ll understand why. Retailers maximize profits at the “clearing rate” for their sales goods. That’s the retail price which maximizes gross revenues at an optimal marginal unit price.
You can’t pass on 99% of a tariff increase if it results in a drop in sales disproportionate to the rise in price. That is to say, if you sell 1000 units for $1 but only 500 unites for $1.15, you are losing $500 in revenue to avoid paying $150 in taxes. Depending on the profit margin by unit (let’s say you pocket 30% of the $1 in sales - or $300 on that $1000 gross expenditure) there may be no incentive to pass on the tax to the consumer for your business. In this example, you can either pay $150 on $300 in pre-tax profit or… $150 on $300 in pre-tax profit.
Losing a lot of your margin may be worthy to keep the business you when you expect it to be rolled back 90 days later it is not acceptable as the permanent state of affairs.
Rapidly changing prices has its own chilling effect on your client base. If consumers see the market price jump 15%, they won’t perfectly mathematically optimize their behaviors to match. They’ll just blindly cut back on consuming out of sticker shock. Or they’ll go hunting for lower rates elsewhere.
The savvier play is one we’ve already seen across the retail sector - shrinkflation. Reduce the volume of unit sold so the margins stay high but the consumer never suffers sticker shock. A bag of chips doesn’t become 15% more expensive, it just gets <insert math on cost of chips>% lighter.
Nobody has a massive margin to start with to pay for the tariffs. Not just margin on the goods but overall operating margin. Just comparing p:rice of imported goods to tariffs doesn’t capture
- Merchant increasing the cost of a broader basket of goods than is tariffed to soften the cost of paying the tariff
- Shrinkflation as you mentioned
- Not changing the price until they have worked through all supply including a larger than normal stock bought as a hedge against inevitably lowered or removed tariffs
- choosing to maintain business at a temporary cost that cannot reasonably be borne forever
In the long run the oversimplification that a useful understanding. The idea that we can live off the largess of the foreigners instead of taxing income is a moronic idea that hasn’t worked any of the other times its been tried. There is every reason for the long term stable price increase to be most of the cost of the tariff even if this isn’t true in the short term in a chaotic environment.
the logic should be partner with your allies and find trade that is not economic but holistically beneficial, considering all scientific factors. It’s hard and inconvenient but long term deescalating.
That’s a very materialist approach to international trade. Unfortunately, we don’t have a government run by people with a materialist mindset.
The way it is supposed to work is that they would buy the part from a local manufacturer, thus protecting that manufacturer from foreign competitors. Problem is we got rid of most of our manufacturing in order to break unions and for shareholders to get an extra .0000001% out of their investment. So tariffs now just hurt us.
They didn’t work previously either.
In fact income tax was created specifically because tariffs don’t work.
The fact that the distinction of who the fees actually get connected from matters so much to people is so crazy to me. It doesn’t matter who the fees are collected from, you’re paying them regardless. If the exporter pays them they will just raise the price you pay to cover the cost. It also amazes me that so many people who were in favor of tariffs somehow think they wouldn’t raise prices even though that’s literally the entire fucking point of tariffs. They raise the prices of foreign goods to give domestic goods that cost more an advantage.
That’s a really big issue, tbh. People don’t get how prices work. You see the same with promotions/sales. A lot of shops/companies will often put their products on sale for 25%, 50% or even more off. And people think they will actually save that amount of money. Instead of realizing that in most cases the sales price is the regular price, and the regular price is inflated by the sales price amount so that if the product is sold the seller still makes the same margins.
In a former job the company started expanding to Asia, and we got a sales guy from Singapore to represent us in Asia. He said that if we aren’t selling with at least 60% rebate, we have no chance of selling stuff in Asia. So we created a new price list for Asia with all the prices tripled.
JCPenney tried to move to a more transparent pricing structure in 2012 and it lost them nearly a billion dollars.
So sad when companies try to do the right thing, the consumer market is too dumb to appreciate it.
Regardless of whether you call it a sale, regular, or inflated prices aren’t you still saving money by buying when it’s relatively low?
I’m aware of the psychology of marketing and the trickery of things like Black Friday. But unless the sale price is literally the same as it was when not on sale, then I’m not following.
Edit: in your Asian rebate example, is the idea that those customers want to see a high price and then get a big rebate when they buy it? That’s fascinating! (And has probably worked on me too)
If the model is high rebates at some times (e.g. an article costs €50 instead of €100 for part of the time), then you do save money buying when it’s at €50.
But you have to remember that €50 is the price at which the seller would usually sell the product. That’s the price that their price calculation says that it should be sold at. Otherwise they’d not be making profit.
So the alternative model is to always sell the article at €50.
Or to put it differently: The seller does the price calculation and comes up with €50 being the price where they would need to sell it to make profit and the price that the customers would still buy it at. It’s the optimal price, and the price they should be going with.
Instead, they sell it for €100, so they can discount it to €50 and put a big “-50%” sticker onto it. Hardly anyone who has the choice buys at €100, everyone waits for the sale, when it’s put to €50. And then more people buy, because they think they have made a massive deal, because they have gotten a €100 item for only €50. They are going to tell all their friends about it, it might even make it into news articles or stuff like that, and then more people buy.
The other option, which is illegal in some countries but legal in others, is to just fake the “full” price all together. The product is always offered at €50, but the sticker says “
€100-50% super sale!”You can see stuff like that on Aliexpress. Pick some article that has a 50% rebate during some sales holiday (e.g. Black Friday). Then look at the article a week later, and in almost all cases the non-rebated price next week will be the same as the rebated price during Black Friday.
People just love being lied to. It’s really sad.
Ah yes, America is finally finding out what a Tarrif actually is, in real time.
The best thing is that even if the tax was paid by the exporter they would just raise the price of their product accordingly for the import region lol
Right? Like, this should be obvious to everyone. Why don’t people immediately see this? It’s crazy.
USA USA USA!
Technically corrext US flag You could put the stars as stars on the circus tent
Ah see I interpreted the image as “it’s a big tent and none of the states are in it” as in the repugants (might have mispelled here) red elites don’t give a shit about the country.
(might have misspelled here)
You didn’t
Great idea, be the first to do it if you want.
Cant. Not on my phone
WE TRIED TO TELL YOU!
I tell you what, the next time this person votes for the orange child rapist he’s going to do it very begrudgingly!!
Haha, just kidding. There’s not going to be elections again, or at least not until the obese imbecile dies and passes on the dictatorship…to Eric.
This way of thinking is hilarious. Dumb too but also hilarious.
What leads anyone to think the source would pay for this.
And that absolute self centered attitude of benefit for him as if the US was the center of the world.
Welcome to international trading and politics. Your country is descending fast and in the coming years you will learn a lot.
No he won’t
Okay fair, he might not. Let’s say there will be a lot opportunity for it! 😂
He will experience many things. He will be lied to about those experiences.
In my home country, the news always mention “could be passed on to consumers” when it’s about import duties. I don’t know what US news tell to Americans for so many consumers to believe they won’t pay a dime on the cost of tariffs.
Oh they announced it loudly that it would be passed down to consumers, but some people prefer to watch opinion channels that played it like tariff and import-tax were different.
A lot of voters sadly only view right wing YouTubers and radio hosts as valid information.
OP is supposed to take their now even less money and start a business/factory/supply chain in america making those things in america so that OP can be extorted by the Trump administration so that Trump can then take OP’s new business from OP.
C’mon that OP isn’t even trying to understand what is happening.
These people can’t be as stupid as these looks into their lives suggest? Ignorant though? They are really ignorant.
